Intel unveils Xe-HPG mid-range and enthusiast gaming GPUs with hardware ray tracing launching in 2021, Nvidia and AMD in trouble?

Two days ago, Intel held its annual Architecture Day event where the company presents its planned product lineups for the upcoming year. Among the multitude of CPUs mentioned in the accompanying slides, Intel slipped a few detailing the upcoming Xe GPUs, and we noticed a totally new lineup called Xe-HPG that will be targeting gamers.

The Xe-HPG GPU lineup is positioned between the Xe-LP entry-level + integrated lineup and the Xe-HP lineup dedicated to servers and AI applications. The strategy here is to market the Xe-HPG lineup in order to fill the gap left for the mid-range and enthusiast gaming sectors.

Unfortunately there are no detailed specs for this new microarchitecture, but, rumor has it that the VRAM type may turn out to be GDDR6, as opposed to the HBM type used with the HP and HPC GPUs. One of the slides mentions that the HPG lineup will get standard packaging and the entire production will be outsourced to an external foundry, most likely TSMC’s equivalent of Intel’s 10 nm nodes.

Last, but not least, the Xe-HPG GPUs are expected to launch some time in 2021 and will integrate hardware-level ray tracing capabilities, so there is a chance these can turn out as decent competitors for Nvidia’s Ampere RTX 3000 cards and AMD’s Navi 21 GPUs.